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Marco Graduate Student News

Graduate Student News

Jeremy Pearson (History)

In the summer of 2017, Pearson accepted a position as a research fellow for the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. In December, Pearson successfully defended his dissertation, “William of Tripoli and his Middle-Eastern Context.”

Brad Phillis (History)

Brad Phillis presented a paper titled “The Crusades in the Twelfth-Century Library of Saint-Amand” at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo in May 2017. In November 2017, he delivered a paper titled “Promises and Pilgrimage: Robert the Frisian, the Battle of Cassel, and the Birth of a Crusading Tradition” at the annual conference of the Southeastern Medieval Association. Both presentations were drawn from his dissertation project, “Two Murders and a Coronation: Crusade, Crisis, and the Counts of Flanders, 1071-1204.” He received a W. K. McClure Scholarship from the UT Center for International Education and a travel fellowship from the UT Humanities Center to support archival work for this project in Belgium, England, and France during the summer of 2017. He also received a VFL Mellon Fellowship from the Vatican Film Library and was in residence as an NEH research fellow at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University in January 2018. He is also a recipient of a graduate fellowship from the UT Humanities Center for the 2017-18 academic year.

Emily Johnson Roberts (English)

Emily Johnson Roberts was selected as the graduate student recipient of the Keith P. Taylor Grant, which funded her travel to Stratford, London, and Edinburgh to study drama as part of a 2017 summer English course. Emily was also awarded a Joseph Trahern Dissertation Fellowship for 2017-2018. In October 2017, she presented a paper titled “Economy and ‘Honesty’ in Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside” at the 74th Annual Southeastern Renaissance Conference at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Kendra Slayton (English)

Kendra Slayton, a PhD candidate in English, was honored to become the inaugural recipient of the John Hurt Fisher Memorial Literature Prize from the Marco Institute for 2018. She has used the time from the course release to work on the first half of her dissertation, titled “‘For commune profit sith it may availle’: Women, Circumscription, and the Common Good in Chaucer.” Slayton argues that Chaucer often applies the terms of theological debates on the paradox of human free will and divine determinism and omniscience to gender politics. Writers such as Boethius and Aquinas attempt to resolve the paradox in an Aristotelian vein, portraying God as a benevolent deity who imbues his creatures with a “natural inclination” towards God as the ultimate good. Drawing on texts such as the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Troilus and Criseyde, the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” the tale of Philomela in the Legend of Good Women, and the “Clerk’s Tale,” Slayton explores how Chaucer makes visible the negative effects of the social circumscription of women: the fracturing of both the common good and individual female (and even male) subjectivity, encouraged to unnaturally incline towards the dictates of socio-ideological forces. Chaucer offers alternate models of gender dynamics, Slayton argues, in tales such as the Parliament of Fowls and the “Tale of Melibee,” in which women, when their agency is acknowledged and their voices heard in public spaces, are able to preclude not only personal trauma, but heal communal fractures. Kendra sincerely thanks the Marco Institute and its benefactors for their continuing and generous support of graduate student research.

Lydia M. Walker (History)

Lydia Walker held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and American Academy in Rome the during academic year 2016-2017. She published “Crusade and Reform: Jacques de Vitry’s Application of the Book of Revelation” in The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, eds. Elizabeth Lapina and Nicholas Morton, Brill (2017). She also presented her research, “Sermons for Every Season: An Investigation of Namur, Grand Séminaire, MS 49,” at the Medieval and Early Modern Festival at the University of Kent, Canterbury (June 2017) and “From Anxiety to Action: Gender and the Body in 13th-Century Pastoral Works,” at the International Medieval Congress (July 2017). As a UT Humanities Center Fellow, Lydia is spending the academic year 2017-2018 finalizing her dissertation.

Marco Graduate Student Fellows

The Marco Institute awarded five graduate fellowships for the 2017-18 academic year. We are grateful to our donors for making these awards possible.

Kyrie Miranda (MFLL-Spanish)Jimmy & Dee Haslam Fellowship in the Public Humanities
This award, new in 2017, provides Kyrie with a course release to work part-time in the Marco Institute’s research, teaching, outreach, and educational programming for the public during the 2017-18 academic year.

Laura Roesch (History)Marco Graduate Teaching Assistant
Laura has served during the 2017-18 academic year as the grader for Marco’s MRST 201/202 Medieval Civilization courses.